December 19th
Hello! It’s incredible that we have almost reached the end of 2025. Given the holiday breaks of the different teams, this is most likely the last Zcash Z3 development update of the year.
A lot of good things have happened. Zcash teams achieved a lot of stuff and price action seems to have realized all the building and Zodling that Zcashers have been doing all of these years.
Although I can’t avoid a sour note. There’s something that we haven’t achieved this 2025: complete Zcashd deprecation. It’s fair to say that many of the detours that development teams took, are indeed building blocks of this “Zcash Comeback”. There are no decisions, only trade-offs.
It is important to note that @aquietinvestor, @joshs and @alex are going to run a new sentiment Poll around the composition of NU7 in mid-january 2026. This will likely point developers towards a more clear vision of what Zcashers want for NU7 in terms of feature sets.
For those asking WHEN Zcashd deprecation…. It’s not only a matter of the specific date when the whole checklist is checked. There’s a cadence to respect and be aware of. I’m going to break down the ecosystem events that lead to Zcashd deprecation in this timeline with the objective of discussing the timing of events regardless of the contents of the seventh NU.
Zcashd version lifecycle: the Zcash ecosystem metronome.
Every 16 weeks a Zcashd version dies and a new one is born. This happens whether Zcashd code is being substantially changed or not. Once a version is released, it can’t be stopped. Nobody can tell you which version of Zcashd to run. Zcashd is designed to stop running at a given blockheight and operators have to update their version to keep validating (or mining) blocks. This means that if you need to release a new version of Zcashd, for the case it requires the current supported version to stop working, you need to wait until the End-of-Support (EOS) of the current version.
This means that the feature that you finish developing today in Zcashd, will only see the light of day on mainnet after the EOS date of the current version, when the version that includes that feature becomes the current version (provided that it doesn’t need a transition cycle). Sometimes that could mean a day, others it can mean 16 weeks. That’s how this metronome keeps a decentralized, permissionless and censorship-resistant protocol keeps everyone coordinated in terms of software releases.
The timeline below shows the current Zcash version and the milestones where the support of the next three versions end.
The next Zcashd EOS is January 21st 2026. This entails that whenever the Zcash development teams have consensus that Zcashd deprecation development is complete, then the ecosystem will need a whole EOS cycle to occur in order to deploy the proper versions that will stop the current supported Zcashd version and allow the Zcash maintainers to create and deploy the End-of-Life version of Zcashd.
The Z3 development cross-team group gathered and estimated that it is acceptable to assess that Zcashd deprecation development completion window could span between now and May 2026 (Zcashd 6.10.1 EOS). This leaves the 16 weeks between 6.10.1 and 6.10.2 to be the cycle buffer where the Z3 infrastructure could co-exist in production with Zcashd for the case NU7 is set to activate in September 2026
This means that NU7 could be targeted for activation after September 2026 indicated by Zcashd 6.10.2 EOS Milestone provided that it is feature complete and the NU process can be carried out by then, with the good practices that the Zcash core developers have been doing all of these years.
Towards a friction-less Network Upgrade process
Zcash core developers are researching ways to reduce the impact of Network Upgrades that include transaction changes. This means less hassle for wallet and infrastructure providers and a higher pace for smaller updates even if they do include transaction format changes. Core developers are committed to improve UX for all ecosystem actors including the most tech savvy ones.
Alright! This was a long introduction. Let’s begin with another week, another Zcash Z3 development update.
Outreach
Status: In progress 
We are getting feedback from Z3 usage and Zallet alpha.2 while letting partners know of alpha.3
Zebra
The ZF team has posted an engineering update where they describe many of the advances that Zebra is incorporating. In terms of the Z3 stack, Gustavo is doing a great job maintaining the Z3 containers and juggling the many pieces and releases. Thank you Gustavo!
Zaino (ZingoLabs)
Project Board
Zaino folks are wrapping up chain index support and preparing release process documents for consumers of Zaino downstream which has been a request from ZF and Zallet folks. @zancas has published brief post with progress on the grant “Zaino, The release”.
Zallet full node wallet
- Status: new alpha incoming!
tracking work on this repository and collaboration opportunities tracked on this board.
Zallet alpha.3 has been released! We are working with Zaino and ZF engineers to iron out some configuration issues between Zainod and Zallet so that the latest Zallet can be available on the Z3 containers. In the meantime you can just use Zallet standalone from code.
Block Explorer Support
Tracking: https://github.com/orgs/zingolabs/projects/15
This has been getting a bit sidelined. There’s no progress still for these. Contributions wanted!
In review:
Done
Thanks for reading!
